When the actor Christopher Reeve died in October, in the closing days of the presidential campaign, I was in demand as a guest on news shows. I had published stories about embryonic stem (ES) cells at Red Herring and the Acumen Journal, two magazines I edited before coming to Technology Review. And in July 1998, before my time, Technology Review was one of the first magazines to publish a long article on ES cells.

Senator John Edwards suggested that ES cell research might have permitted the quadriplegic Reeve to walk. He implied that President Bush (who opposes ES cell research because human embryos are destroyed in the process of harvesting the cells) was complicit in Mr. Reeve's suffering. That the president was suppressing science for political and religious reasons. Nonsense, retorted defenders of the administration, like senate majority leader Bill Frist: no scientist could say for sure what ES cells could do. Certainly, they wouldn't have helped Christopher Reeve.